Black and grey lettering and clock tattoo with an ornate scrolled frame, shown on the lower back with part of a feathered wing at the top edge.

Ornate clock face with a wing above

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of an ornate clock face inside a scrolled frame, with numerals around the dial and a single hand pointing towards the centre. Curved lettering runs along the lower part of the frame, and part of a feathered wing sits at the top edge of the photo. The frame is solid black with fine grey detailing on the dial, shown against pale skin.

Lettering Back Clock Clock face Numeral Wing Scrollwork Lettering Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Quarry had been told the shop on Gull Stair closed at six, so she was surprised to find the door open and the lamp lit, and Old Tobias bent over his bench with a loupe screwed into one eye. The room smelled of brass oil and wet rope. Every clock on the walls ticked slightly out of step with the others, and the harbour came through the open window in a long, slow breath.

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"Thirteen," he said, without looking up. "You've been counting wrong your whole life, girl, and so has everyone on this quay. The twelve is a courtesy we extend so the tides can keep their appointments."

She had come about her father's watch, which had stopped the night the lifeboat went out and never started again. Tobias lifted a face from the bench, an ornate thing in a black scrolled frame, with a pale hole where the hands should have been and numerals crowded round the dial. A gull's wing had been cut into the top of the frame, and someone had engraved a line along the bottom: we only forever, just long at all. "A sailor's wife ordered it," he said. "She wanted the hour she spent waiting to be one hour longer than the rest. I gave her the extra numeral, and she paid me in salt cod and a promise I never asked her to keep."

He took the watch from her palm, opened it, and set the hands by the thirteenth numeral without a glance at the sea. Out past the breakwater, the lifeboat bell rang once, late, and Mabel found she was counting along.